Fiction, Reviews

‘The Vanished,’ by Brett Battles

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I’m a fan of Brett Battles’ Jonathan Quinn series of thrillers, about a “cleaner” – a man who works as a contractor for espionage agencies, getting rid of evidence – and bodies – for them. The latest book is The Vanished.

Nine years ago, Quinn and his team attempted to provide protection for a brilliant scientist, in part as a favor to her sister, who was an agent. The job went bad, and the scientist was spirited away (not involuntarily, I might add). Since then, the agent sister has been inactive on the job – obsessed with finding and rescuing her sister.

But now Quinn and his team have been temporarily sidelined by their employers. Shocking news from France motivates them to travel there and try to rescue the sister on their own. This will involve merely getting past the security of one of the most technologically advanced corporations in the world.

The main thing that distinguishes The Vanished as a story is that author Battles decided to set it in 2020, incorporating the whole business of Covid-19 lockdown protocols. That makes some things harder for them and some things easier, but did not (for this reader) make the story much more interesting. As you know, I’m a reader who likes character-driven stories. The Jonathan Quinn series is generally pretty good in that department, but this story was mostly about procedures and technology. I didn’t find it compelling.

But it’s a good series. You might like this one better than I do.

Music

Christmastime: Let Us Be Merry; Put Sorrow Away

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In a week, we will be set upon by Christmas. I hope you, your friends, family, and neighbors will receive God’s transforming grace to know with confidence what the Lord has done by taking on flesh and living as one of us.

The Christmas carol in this video, “A Virgin Unspotted,” used to be very popular and can be found in many variations. The music, “Judea,” was written by William Billings in 1778.

Billings was a tanner who taught himself music and was friends with men you know from the American Revolution. Britannica states, “His music is noted for its rhythmic vitality, freshness, and straightforward harmonies.” That’s what I love about this song. The joyous chorus that dances round the room.

The words come derive from a 1661 carol called “In Bethlehem City,” which appears in many versions and was originally paired with a tune that has been lost. The writers of Hymns and Carols of Christmas state, “The carol has appeared in one form or another in most of the old collections of songs, and was a popular subject for the broadside trade. Interestingly, it almost never appears in hymnals.”

I came to know the song through The Rose Ensemble album, And Glory Shown Around.

Poetry

A Threshold Crossed: 30 Robertson Poems

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Each threshold crossed a point of no return;
each turn of the door knob a turn of fate.
Take each step boldly, confident you’ll earn
access to behold some mystery great
with import or delight, that dawn will break
on an undiscovered country with stores
of adventure and peril that can slake
the greatest thirst––all this and so much more
awaits you on the other side of every door.

“Enter” by Steven R. Robertson

Robertson spent November 2020 writing a poem a day, the above being his first offering (I hope he doesn’t mind me copying it here.)

Poetry is a difficult art, easy for good-hearted folk to do badly. That’s isn’t a sin, of course. If they enjoy crafting their poems, who can say they have wasted their time? Robertson’s poems are rather good, each in a different style. The one above is a Spenserian Stanza.

Short poems like these are a bit like flash fiction; they present you with an idea or emotional picture and sometimes a clever turn of phrase, but they are easily sipped up and forgotten. Reading these things within a social group may motivate readers to pause long enough to reflect on them. Do blogs still provide that kind of social group, or has the world moved on to shinier things?

Photo by Gisela Bonanno on Unsplash

Reviews

Netflix film review: ‘The Professor and the Madman’

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Back in 2015, I read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (which I reviewed here) as part of my graduate school work. It was one of the few pleasures that course of study provided me. So I was delighted to learn that a movie had been made of the story, and that it was available on Netflix.

According to what I see online, star Mel Gibson (who plays Prof. James Murray, head of the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language project) was very unhappy with the way the film was made. He and writer Farhad Safinia sued the producers, and they finally came to an undisclosed settlement. Apparently the film we have is not the one Gibson dreamed of.

I’m glad I read about that after I’d seen the film, because what I saw pleased me immensely.

Overall, the movie covers events as described in the book. Dr. William Minor (Sean Penn), an American military surgeon unbalanced by his experiences in the Civil War, murders an innocent London laborer, under the delusion that he is an Irishman who’s been persecuting him. Judged insane, Minor is confined to the Broadmoor Insane Asylum. His life begins to find some focus again when he answers Prof. Murray’s appeal for volunteers to hunt out historical citations of various English words for the dictionary. Working obsessively with books allowed him by the asylum director, he provides the project with a much-needed boost.

Meanwhile, Prof. Murray, who lacks a university degree but got his position through plain expertise in languages, suffers professional and social opposition from the scholars at Oxford University Press. A long-distance friendship arises between him and Dr. Minor, but it’s only when he finally goes to present Minor with a first printing of part of the work that he discovers his friend is a madman.

Meanwhile, Minor – though still delusional about many things, is tormented by guilt and attempts to get his pension money conveyed to his victim’s widow. At first she rejects his help angrily, but in time her genuine desperation and his genuine remorse result in a strange affection – leading to a shocking outcome.

As in all dramatic productions, events are rearranged and re-molded to suit the creators’ vision. And dramatic moments happen that never happened in our world. But the film’s vision, as I perceived it, was a very fine one. It has to do with guilt and forgiveness and love, and the importance of work in our lives. It doesn’t rise quite to the level of Christianity, but there are Christian themes all over the place.

The depiction of Victorian England is rich and convincing. The performances are excellent.

My one great complaint is that in one scene, a character – an Oxford scholar, no less – misuses the phrase, “begs the question.” That just isn’t done, old man.

Cautions for very disturbing scenes of violence and insanity. Not for the kids.

Uncategorized

“Except for the porridge”

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In pursuit of my mission to enlighten the world on Norwegian Christmas customs, I offer the clever TV commercial above, complete with English subtitles.

It will help your comprehension to know that the “nisse” is roughly what the English would call a brownie, or possibly a gnome. He is distinguished by his characteristic red cap. Every farm has at least one, and they control the farm’s luck. Get on his wrong side and he’ll sour the milk, sicken the livestock, sabotage the equipment, etc. My maternal grandmother’s father, according to my mother, blamed everything that went wrong on his farm on the smågubbe, the “little old man,” who was the same as the nisse (like the elves, they prefer it if you don’t use their name).

One matter of supreme importance in coexisting with the nisse is the Christmas porridge (julegrøt). The nisse expects to get a bowlful of the family’s Christmas porridge every Christmas Eve. You leave it out in the barn for him. He especially requires that a generous pat of butter be placed on top. Neglect that, and you can expect a very bad year. Sometimes it’s the farm owner’s fault, and sometimes the fault of a lazy servant. It makes no difference. The nisse must have his due. (I wonder who screwed up last Christmas.)

Tine is a popular brand of butter in Norway, and they did themselves proud with this charming and technically excellent ad, a few years back.

Music

Some Children See Him like Themselves

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“Some children see him bronzed and brown,
The lord of heav’n to earth come down;
Some children see him bronzed and brown,
With dark and heavy hair.”

I appreciate artwork depicting Christ Jesus as someone in a different ethnic context than he lived. I suppose that should go without saying, since we tend to understand Jesus of Nazareth did not look like the Romanized figure we most recognize. If we depict him in a painting at all, we’re going to depict him as we are.

Alfred Burt wrote the music to this Christmas carol for his family Christmas card in 1951, a tradition his father started in 1922. Alfred wrote fifteen such carols, including “The Star Carol” and “Caroling, Caroling.” You can see all of the cards and songs on this tribute page.

The carols were known primarily to those who received the cards until Burt was invited to the King Family Christmas party and introduced a various Hollywood people. That emboldened him to get enough material together for an album, which was released in 1954.

The King family was something of a big deal last century. I haven’t heard of them, but they sang as an ever-growing family for decades and had their own variety show in the mid-60s. In 1967, they put together a live Christmas special that offered viewers this special moment of a son returning from Vietnam while she sang of him on stage.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Victims of Foul Play, by Patricia Lubeck

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I feel a little badly about reviewing this book. It was not written by a professional, and does not pretend to literary quality. It’s aimed at a very small public. But I read it as a favor to someone, and I feel that calls for a review.

On a December morning in 1961, farmer Clarence Larson of rural Garvin, Minnesota called for a neighbor’s help. His wife was dead, her body wrapped around the power take-off of their tractor. He said she’d been helping him “elevate” some corn into a bin (a procedure employing an augur in a chute; I know it well) when she got caught in the mechanism. (This was not uncommon; I heard many stories of people losing arms in power take-offs when I was a kid, and I knew a guy whose brother was killed by one of them.) However, in this case, an unexplained injury to the back of the woman’s head, plus the condition of the body, along with the presence of a new insurance policy, aroused suspicions. The county, however, was unable to prove Clarence’s guilt to a jury, and he went free.

Clarence moved to Tracy, Minnesota, and remarried. In 1980, his new wife disappeared. She failed to show up for regular appointments, and left behind personal possessions to which she’d been attached. When people asked about her, Larson gave conflicting explanations. The county sheriff called in the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (which you may know from John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport novels), and even a psychic. But sufficient evidence was never found to convict Larson of murder.

Patricia Lubeck’s book, Victims of Foul Play, is a bald and artless chronological account of events. There can be no doubt that the author believes Larson got away with murder. But in the end, she leaves us with the same thing the authorities had to accept: the man was a clever murderer who managed to hide any really incriminating evidence.

Victims of Foul Play will be of interest to people interested in the local history of Lyon County, Minnesota. I can’t recommend it to anyone else. It is not well written.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Quantum Kill,’ by Blake Banner

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“Of course you are. You’re James Bond cleverly disguised as an inbred redneck.”

“Thanks, I love you too. Actually, in my experience, most rednecks I have met were very fine people with solid values. And the worst inbreds I’ve met were among the European aristocracies and the Boston Brahmins.”

Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Cobra series, is an assassin working for a private security firm that contracts to the government (for deniability). He is deadly and efficient and ruthless, but he has a code – he only kills the worst of the worst.

So he’s surprised when, as Quantum Kill opens, his bosses call him out of a well-earned vacation, asking him to do a job entirely outside his wheelhouse. There’s a woman (they won’t tell him who) at a certain place in Canada. Harry is to pick her up and transport her to Washington DC by a certain date, by a devious route he can work out for himself.

When he finally meets the woman, she’s a puzzle. She’s attractive, but strangely distant and affectless. She makes no effort to make friends, but soon they have more to worry about than their relations, when hit teams locate them – they can’t figure out how – and Harry has to do what he does best to keep her alive. It gets more puzzling when he figures out that the hit teams are CIA.

As they take a roundabout route as far out of their way as the Azores, the barriers between them start to break down. But more is going on than Harry and his employers have been told, and in the end he will resolve the problem through doing what he does best, in a shocking but oddly satisfying climax.

I’ve read some of Blake Banner’s books outside the Cobra series, and I was disappointed in certain attitudes and plot elements, especially in religious matters. But in this series, I haven’t had that problem – such opinions as Harry Bauer expresses generally please me.

I’m torn a bit as to how strongly I should recommend this series to our readers. In terms of reading pleasure, it’s top notch. My interest never flagged from the first page to the last (and as I grow older, flagging interest is a problem I have increasingly as I read). But the violence is harsh and stark and uncompromising. I feel a certain amount of guilt for enjoying it so much.

But enjoy it I do.

Poetry

Who Wrote the Footprints Poem?

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One night I dreamed a dream.
As I was walking along the beach with my Lord.
Across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life.
For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand,
One belonging to me and one to my Lord.

This is the start of the famous, anonymously written “Footprints” poem. Many have tried to establish ownership. Justin Taylor makes a few notes and points out an introduction to one of Spurgeon’s sermons that takes the footprints in the sand imagery in a better direction than the poem did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Moon Is Down,’ by John Steinbeck

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Tom wiped his forehead. “If we get through, we’ll tell them, sir but—well, I’ve heard it said that in England there are still men in power who do not dare to put weapons in the hands of common people.”

Orden stared at him. “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that. Well, we can only see. If such people still govern England and America, the world is lost, anyway. Tell them what we say, if they will listen. We must have help, but if we get it”—his face grew very hard—“if we get it, we will help ourselves.”

In 1940, author John Steinbeck spoke with Pres. Roosevelt and began doing volunteer work with government intelligence and information agencies. He spoke to Col. William “Wild Bill” Donovan of the OSS about the need for effective Allied propaganda for distribution in occupied countries. This led him to write a short novel called The Moon Is Down.

The Moon Is Down begins with the invasion of a small town in a country that resembles (but is not identical with) Norway. The town falls with minimal bloodshed, because a local businessman – a collaborationist – has prepared the way for the occupiers (who are obviously German but not specifically identified as such). The officers take up residence in part of the Mayor’s Palace. Mayor Orden seems a strangely passive leader – he considers himself the voice of the people, and he isn’t sure yet what the people think about all this.

Over time the people’s opinion becomes very clear. They hate the occupiers and will do everything they can to obstruct them, especially through slowing and sabotaging the work at the local coal mine. The reader spends a lot of time with the occupying officers, who are little happier about the situation than the locals. They‘d expected to be greeted as friends and heroes, but instead found constant hatred and ostracism, which saps their spirit.

In the end, major sacrifices will be demanded of the locals, but they are sacrifices they are willing to make – because you can’t suppress free people forever.

The Moon Is Down is an effective story – though a little rose-colored for my taste. The author’s professed confidence in the resilience of free men seems a little naïve in light of recent history – give the enemies of freedom control of the media and education for a couple generations, and we’ve seen what they can do. Editor Donald V. Coers, in his introduction, makes much of the surprising fact that the book was harshly criticized by American liberals (prominently Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber), who condemned it for humanizing the occupiers rather than demonizing them. But Steinbeck seems to have been right, because the citizens of occupied countries found the book highly evocative of their own experience. Thousands of illegal copes were cranked out on mimeograph machines (if you’re as old as I am you might remember how much work that entailed) and secretly distributed all over Europe.

I first learned of the existence of The Moon Is Down while reading The Jøssing Affair, which I reviewed a few days back. I was surprised I’d never seen it mentioned before, but having read it, I think I know why. Modern leftists find the liberty Steinbeck celebrates here a little excessive, especially the parts (more than one) where he celebrates the importance of owning weapons.

The Moon Is Down is a simple book that reads almost like a stage play (it was, of course, made into a play as well). Worth reading for the quality of the writing, and for a look into an older, wiser kind of liberalism.